In the present disclosure, where a document, an act and/or an item of knowledge is referred to and/or discussed, then such reference and/or discussion is not an admission that the document, the act and/or the item of knowledge and/or any combination thereof was at the priority date, publicly available, known to the public, part of common general knowledge and/or otherwise constitutes prior art under the applicable statutory provisions; and/or is known to be relevant to an attempt to solve any problem with which the present disclosure may be concerned with. Further, nothing is disclaimed.
Many people purchase goods and/or services online from merchants, such as Amazon®, Target®, and others. Such purchases are typically made via the merchants' websites and/or mobile apps using payment card information, such as credit card information and/or debit card information. In order to make such shopping experience simpler, many of such merchants optionally allow for the payment card information to be saved on the merchants' computer systems for future use. Therefore, based on the customers' sign in into the merchants' systems, such as via provision of an email address and/or a password, the payment card information is readily available for authorizing payment. However, despite such functionality, there are many drawbacks.
A person's payment card information is often stolen, misused, lost, expired, and/or updated. Consequently, new payment card information is issued to the person and the old payment card information is deactivated. The new payment card information usually includes a new card number, a new card expiration date, and/or a new card security code. Accordingly, if the person had the old payment card information previously saved on some merchant's computer system, then, in order to make another purchase through that merchant, the person typically has to manually enter the new payment card information into that merchant's computer system. Although such steps are relatively minimal for a single merchant, cumulatively, this process becomes tedious, time consuming, emotionally draining, and/or inconvenient if the person must repeat this process for many merchants. Such process becomes even more tedious, time consuming, emotionally draining, and/or inconvenient when performed at different times for different merchants because the user can misplace and/or forget merchant related sign in information and/or have the new payment card information stolen, misused, lost, expired, and/or updated in the interim.
Moreover, the person may not remember every website and/or app that needs to be updated and at least with paying bills online, such as utility bills, entertainment bills, and/or others, the person may only find out about providing new payment card information when the merchant contacts the person for lack of payment. Such state of being hardship not only for the person, but also for the merchant who has to dedicate resources for tracking down the customer for the lack of payment and/or ensuring that the customer actually pays. Also, such forgetfulness can lead to potential negative impact on the person's credit score.
Although online payment services, such as Paypal®, can somewhat mitigate the above, many merchants avoid using such services at least due to competition, security, added complexity, more computer infrastructure, additional service and/or transaction fees, which cut into the merchants' profits.